Thursday, June 30, 2016

Did you know that Vandam Street in New York was named for Jeanne-Claude van Damme? Or that Smith Street was named for Anna Nicole Smith?

Of course you didn't. Because of course they weren't.

However that hasn't stopped NeighborhoodX having a little fun re-imagining the etymology of New York's Streets. In Renaming New York NeighborhoodX has redrawn the map of New York renaming streets for famous celebrities and products.

Swiss broadcaster RTS has mapped out the 88 goals scored so far in the UEFA Euro 2016 competition. Les 88 Buts de l'Euro allows you to view the pitch location of all 88 goals and even watch each of the goals on video.

Of the 88 goals only 13 have been scored from outside the penalty area. So far there have been 3 own goals, 40 right-footed goals, 28 left-footed goals and 17 goals from headers. You can hover over all the goal map markers on the pitch map to reveal which player scored the goal.

The drop-down menus above the map allow you to filter the goals shown by country or by competition stage.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Some fishing fleets are managing to illegally flout international and national fishing quota regulations by transferring fish at sea to large 'reefers', large commercial vessels which receive and freeze the fish before transporting them to other destinations. In this way the fishing ships are able to avoid detection of their over-fishing by local fishing authorities.

ODI has used data from FishSpektrum to map the suspicious movements of 35 reefers in western African waters in 2013. Western Africa's Missing Fish uses CartoDB's Torque library to animate the tracks of these 35 commercial vessels.

Each of these animated maps is accompanied by a brief 'Tracking History', which explains the reefer's activity and why this is thought to be suspicious. Details about where the ship is registered, its type and its carrying capacity is also provided.

Back in January Emy Analytics released a Building Heights in London map. They have now released a new interactive map which incredibly shows the heights of all buildings in England.

Building Heights in England uses data from the Environment Agency's open LIDAR data to color building footprints in all of England by the height of each building. You can use the map's search function to zoom the map to any location in the country. You can then click on any building on the map to find out its exact height and its area size.

The Building Heights in England map also provides a statistical breakdown of building height data for England's top 25 urban areas. If you select one of these urban areas from the map menu you can view information in the map sidebar on the number of buildings in the area, the density of buildings and a histogram which shows a breakdown of all buildings in the area by height.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

This coming Saturday Australians will be voting in the Australian federal election. These maps can help you discover who is standing, where you can vote and where the two main party leaders are campaigning.

The Google Interactive Election Map allows voters to find their nearest polling booth and find out who is running in their election area. Each polling booth on the map includes a handy directions link which shows you how you can get to your booth.

On election day the Google map will change to a live results map. You will be able to use the map to see the percentage of votes counted for each party in each of the 150 electorates

The Guardian's Campaign Election Tracker is mapping all the campaign visits by Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull in the lead up to the election. As well as tracking the number of visits by each of the two party leaders The Guardian is also keeping a running tally of the number of times each candidate has spoken about different political issues.

Each electoral seat on the two different candidate tracking maps is shaded by the number of visits the candidates have made to the seat. A full list of campaign events by both candidates is shown beneath the maps.

The 2016 Electorate Policy Spend Tracker shows you how many tax dollars each party has promised in different policy areas and where they say that money will be spent. The coalition has so far committed to $7.664b in policy spending and the ALP has made $8.389b in campaign promises.

Here at Maps Mania Towers we always enjoy a little map quiz. Today we have mainly been passing the time by playing Geoquiz.

There are many, many different map quizzes out there, so to grab our attention a quiz has to feature something a little different. The USP of Geoquiz is that you don't have to type in the names of long, difficult to spell place-names when you answer a question. Instead you can just speak your answer.

The quiz itself is very simple. You are shown a succession of countries on a map and all you need to do is to speak the name of the country. If you have given the game permission to access your device's microphone Geoquiz will then tell you if you have got the answer correct or wrong.

Esri has released a great cascading Story Map exploring the achievements of the geographer, naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. In Alexander von Humboldt's Whole Earth Vision Esri uses vintage maps, Esri's own 3d maps and historical images to help explain the scope and importance of Humboldt's discoveries in South America.

The story map looks in particular at Humboldt's attempt to climb Ecuador's Chimborazo Mountain and his exploration of the Orinoco River. As you progress through the story map Humboldt's achievements, observations and contributions to science are illustrated with historical maps from the David Rumsey Collection, Humboldt's own diagrams and Esri's interactive maps.

The Esri story map of Humboldt's Whole Earth Vision concludes with a final section which explores the legacy of Humboldt's work and his influence on other scientists, writers and statesmen.

You can see more examples of Esri's cascading Story Maps format and learn how to create your own atEsri Story Map Cascade.

Monday, June 27, 2016

Spain's second general election in six months has once again resulted in no political party gaining enough votes to take overall control of the government. You can view how each municipality voted in this interactive map from El Diario.

One surprise in the results was that the anti-austerity party Podemos did not increase their share of the vote. They were widely expected to overtake the socialist PSOE party, who again were the second most popular party. From the map you can see that Podemos still polled relatively well in the Basque country.

Elsewhere the map shows that the Catalonian parties still dominate in Catalonia and the two main parties, the PP and PSOE, polled well in the areas where they traditionally have a lot of support.

Gunma GIS Geek has used the Leaflet mapping platform to create interactive maps from a couple of famous Japanese pilgrimage mandalas. Pilgrimage mandalas are paintings which provide a panoramic view of temple and shrine sites.

The first map on Temple Pilgrimage Mandala is of the Nachi Pilgrimage Mandala. This 16th–17th century hanging scroll depicts the Nachi Shrine on the Kii Peninsula in Japan. The painting presents the journey of two pilgrims (the couple clothed in white) as they enter the scene (bottom right) and take a circuitous route through the temple complex to the Nachi shrine.

You can learn more about some of the over 50 buildings depicted in the painting on the Embodying Compassion website. Embodying Compassion includes an interactive version of the Nachi Pilgrimage Mandala. This interactive version of the mandala features a number of markers which allow you to learn more about the buildings, temples and statues depicted in the mandala.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Choice and Chance is an impressive and harrowing mapped visualization recounting the events of June 12 in the Pulse nightclub. The visualization uses a 3d map of the nightclub to illustrate a number of first-hand eye witness accounts of Omar Mateen's murder of killed 49 innocent people.

At the heart of this interactive report is a three.js powered 3d map of the Pulse nightclub. The 3d model of the nightclub is used as the backdrop to a narrative account of some of the events that happened after Omar Mateen entered the club. As you progress through the narrative the 3d map rotates and zooms to explore some of the first-hand accounts of the harrowing events which took place that night.

The eye witness accounts and the realism of the 3d map of the club make this visualization particularly upsetting. The use of different colored
lighting effects adds even more realism to this retelling of the nightmarish events that took place in the Pulse nightclub on June 12th.

In the middle of the Twentieth Century new highways were driven through a large number of American cities, ruining the character of many
neighborhoods for ever.

The Institute for Quality Communities at the University of Oklahoma has put together a series of historical and modern aerial images to show the
impact of mid-Twentieth Century urban renewal on American cities. 60 Years of Urban Change allows you to compare historical aerial images of a number of America's biggest cities with aerial imagery of the same areas, showing how they look today.

By comparing the modern and historical aerial imagery it is possible to see the impact of the mid-century construction boom on many of these
cities. New highways, parking lots, housing projects and mega-structures were built at the expense of small lots of integrated streets and tight
communities.

You can now create a little Street View based movie showing your house being destroyed by aliens. A new website, promoting the release of the new Independence Day movie, allows you to view your house on Google Maps Street View, after it has been destroyed by an invading army of aliens.

Just enter your address into Independence Day - My Street and you can view a little Street View scene showing the alien inflicted destruction at your address. Pan around the Street View scene and you can see fires burning, smoke rising and darkened skies. Look up and you might also spot a fleet of UFO's flying around overhead.

This amazing Street View interactive is possible because of Google's undocumented Street View depth library, You can make use of this depth
data in Street View yourself with the GSVPanoDepth library, developed by 0xef.

Fake is the New Real has released a map showing the vote margins in the UK's European Union referendum. It visualizes where and by how much UK voters voted to leave or remain in the EU.

Most other visualizations I've seen have used a choropleth map to show the extent to which areas voted to leave or remain in the EU. This map uses colored scaled circles to show the vote margins in each UK local government area, region, and country. I think the result is a much clearer visualization of the support for staying in or leaving the EU around the UK.

If you select the country option you can see that Northern Island voted to remain and Wales voted to leave. However in both cases only by a small margin. The biggest margins were in Scotland and England - both on opposing sides. This really emphasizes the huge political gap between the two countries at the moment and I suspect predicts Scotland's eventual split from the Union Kingdom.

If you select the regions option you can see that London was the only region in the whole of England which voted to remain. This points to a huge political and cultural divide in England between the capital and the rest of the country.

Switching to the local government area view it is clear that outside of London the main areas which voted to remain were mainly the largest university towns, Overall remain proved most popular with younger voters, the higher educated and those on higher median incomes. This seems to be confirmed by this view of voting margins in local government areas.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

The National Park Service website has a wonderful illustrated map of the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts. The Saugus lron Works was the ﬁrst successful, integrated iron works in the New World.

The illustrated map has been made interactive using the Leaflet mapping platform. It was well worth the effort as you can use the interactive map controls to zoom into the beautiful detail in this pictorial map. Check-out the individual trees, people and the geese & wading birds in the river.

It is a shame there in no option to turn off the map labels. The labels are obviously important to aide navigation but you could appreciate the artwork more without them. Having gone to the trouble of creating the interactive map tiles from the pictorial map the next step might be to add a little information to the map, It would be an easy enough job to make the building's interactive. This interactivity could then open pop-up windows or could add information to another page element outside of the map.

Friday, June 24, 2016

The Vancouver Assessment Map is an interactive map showing how land assessment values have changed in Vancouver over the last ten years. The map visualizes how land & building values in the city have altered from July 2005 to July 2015.

The map includes an interesting 3d view, which allows you to view building & land values as extruded 3d building footprints or building lots. If you happen to loathe this type of mapped data visualization you can always switch to the 2d view, which presents a more traditional choropleth view of Vancouver land & building values.

You can use the time control on the map to select to view land & building values for any year. Alternatively you can press play to automatically progress through all ten years of the land & building values. This animated view of the data provides a neat overview of how and where properties in Vancouver have increased over the last ten years.

This technique of animating through colored building plots has been used in the past by some building age maps - in order to visualize how cities have grown over time. You can see examples of this in the Amsterdam Growing Over Time map and the LA Building Age map.

Yesterday the UK voted to leave the European Union. The immediate result has seen the Prime Minister announce his intended resignation and mayhem in the markets.

The interactive maps emerging in the main broadsheets this morning suggest that outside of London, Scotland, Northern Ireland and a few major cities most of the country voted to leave the EU. It also appears that the vote to leave was won by those voters who are facing the brunt of the government's austerity programme.

The Guardian has used a cartogram to illustrate how different areas voted in the EU referendum. On the map each electoral region has been sized by population. The result is a map which distorts the geography of the UK but more accurately reflects the number of votes cast for each side in the election.

Outside of London, Scotland, Northern Ireland and a few major cities the majority of the country voted to leave the EU. The Guardian has examined the demographics of each local area authority, exploring education levels, age and median income. These demographic graphs color each local authority based on whether a majority voted to leave or remain in the EU.

The graphs clearly show most of the areas that voted to leave are poorer, have less experience of higher education and tend to have an older population. Conversely it seems that remain voters were more likely to be richer, younger and have experience of higher education.

The Times has created a hexagon grid map to visualize the EU referendum result. Each local authority is colored to show how the area voted. Each color is also shaded to show the strength of the leave or remain vote in each local authority area. The darker the yellow or blue then the higher the vote for leave or remain.

This shading of the hexagons reveals some interesting results in London, where it appears that boroughs with higher median average incomes have voted more strongly to remain than the poorer outer boroughs. So even in areas which voted to remain in the EU it appears that those on lower incomes were more likely to have voted leave than those on higher incomes.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

In Mineral Country, Nevada the annual arrest rate is 2 people per 100,000. Just over the border in Esmeralda County the arrest rate is an incredible 126 per 100,000 people. Are the citizens of Esmeralda County relentless criminals or is something else going on here?

In Arresting America Fusion has mapped the arrest rates in most counties in the United States (there are some gaps in the data so some counties are missing). The map provides a choropleth view of where the police make the most and least arrests as a percentage of the population.

Fusion asks if these huge differences in arrest rates, displayed on the map, reflect the amount of crime in different areas or whether the police in some areas are targeting citizens - because they are black or because the police are writing tickets to raise money.

The End is Nigh! You can't escape your destiny. Your road and your house are about to die. The only choice you have is whether you want your home to be destroyed by fire, flood or alien invasion.

1. Urban Jungle
Check out your house on Urban Jungle and you can see what happens when you forget to weed your garden. Urban Jungle allows you to catch a
glimpse of what your post-apocalyptic house will look like, after civilization has collapsed and nature has reasserted its dominance over man.

Drop Pegman on the Urban Jungle Google Map and you can view your house in Street View - only this is Street View with a difference. Urban Jungle's Street View includes creeping vines and grass superimposed on Google's panoramic imagery.

2. World Under Water
Do you want to see what your house will look like once global warming causes the inevitable rise in sea levels? Just type in your address into
World Under Water and you can catch a glimpse of your house sinking under the waves.

World Under Water is a very powerful campaign from Carbon Story which uses Google's panoramic imagery to provide a warning about rising sea
levels. Once you have typed in your address into the application you can watch the rising water lap against the Street View image of your front door. Yikes!

3. Perfect Storms
To promote the last season of Perfect Storms the History Channel created this interactive that allows you to virtually destroy your house in a
fire storm.

The app uses a combination of Google Maps and Street View to show the likely effects of a perfect storm on your own home and neighborhood. Just sit back and watch as your home disappears behind a wall of flames.

4. Independence Day - My Street
It is also possible to see your home being destroyed by aliens. Independence Day - My Street creates a little Street View based movie showing how your home might look after an alien invasion.

Just enter your address and you can view a little Street View scene showing the alien inflicted
destruction of your home. Pan around the Street View scene and you
can see fires burning, smoke rising and darkened skies. Look up and you
might also spot a huge fleet of UFO's flying around overhead.

5. Brick Street View
Of course the end that we all fear the most is being turned into miniature toy versions of ourselves. In Legoland's 'Brick Street View' everything is made of bricks. That includes your home!.

Brick Street View allows you to take a little glimpse into the parallel world of Legoland and observe how your house would look if it was made of tiny colored bricks. Type your address into the Legoland Google Map and then drop the Lego Pegman onto your street. You can then view your home as it will appear when Lego finally takes over the whole world.

The Battle of the Somme was the largest battle of World War I on the Western Front. It took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 and more than a million men were wounded or killed. Around 90 of the dead were from the small English county of Rutland.

Rutland and the Battle of the Somme is a new interactive map which recounts the history of the Battle of the Somme and explains when, where and how the soldiers from Rutland died. The map includes a timeline feature which recounts the progress of the battle in chronological order.

As you progress through the battle the map updates to show the front line of the battle as it stood at the beginning of every month. A small information window at the top of the map also provides brief updates on the progress of the battle.

Poppy shaped markers are added to the map by date to show when and where Rutland soldiers were killed. You can click on the markers to learn more about each individual soldier commemorated on the map. The red cross markers show where a soldier was severely injured, before dying late in hospital.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

You can now create a little Street View based movie showing your house being destroyed by aliens. A new website, promoting the release of the Independence Day movie, allows you to view your house on Google Maps Street View, after it has been destroyed by an invading army of aliens.

Just enter your address into Independence Day - My Street and you can view a little Street View scene showing the alien inflicted destruction at your address. Pan around the Street View scene and you can see fires burning, smoke rising and darkened skies. Look up and you might also spot a fleet of UFO's flying around overhead.

This amazing Street View interactive is possible because of Google's undocumented Street View depth library, You can make use of this depth data in Street View yourself with the GSVPanoDepth library, developed by 0xef.

In April Mapzen's Pelias geocoder accidentally started suggesting that Denmark's Copenhagen was in Sweden. Mapzen of course quickly rectified the mistake. However to atone for this error Mapzen has published an interesting article which explains how the mistake was made, how Pelias has been fixed and why Copenhagen is not in Sweden.

The Assault on Copenhagen is not only an interesting read in terms of how Pelias mistakenly placed Copenhagen in Sweden (damn those pesky centroids) but also a really interesting account of the Second Northern War, 1655-1660. In this little history lesson Mapzen explains how Denmark was able to hold on to Copenhagen despite a series of assaults on the city by Sweden.

The article is accompanied by an interactive map which illustrates how King Charles X advanced on Copenhagen in his attempt to capture the city for Sweden.

Bertrand Piccard is currently flying over the Atlantic in Solar Impulse, the latest stage in the first round the world solar powered flight. You can follow the flight in real-time on the Solar Impulse LIVE website.

Solar Impulse LIVE features a Google Map showing the plane's current position and its complete track, since it took off from New York on June 20th. The track also features Tweets sent by Piccard during his flight across the Atlantic.

A live YouTube stream from the cockpit of Solar Impulse is overlaid on top of the map. You also have access to a virtual cockpit where you can view details on Solar Impulse's current speed, heading, and altitude.

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Choice and Chance is an impressive and harrowing mapped visualization, by the Tampa Bay Times, of some of the events that occurred in the Pulse nightclub on the night of June 12, 2016, when Omar Mateen killed 49 innocent people and wounded 53 others.

At the heart of this interactive report is a three.js 3d map of the Pulse nightclub. The 3d model of the nightclub is used as the backdrop to a narrative account of some of the events that happened after Omar Mateen entered the club. As you progress through the narrative the 3d map rotates and zooms to explore some of the first-hand accounts of the harrowing events which took place that night.

The first-hand accounts and realism of the 3d map of the club make this visualization particularly upsetting. The use of different colored lighting effects adds even more realism to this retelling of the nightmarish events that took place in the Pulse nightclub on June 12th.

Sigur Rós – Route One is a live 'slow TV' event, which for 24 hours will be live broadcasting a summer solstice journey around Iceland. Rock band Sigur Rós are currently driving around Iceland's 1,332km long coastal ring road and broadcasting the whole event on YouTube.

If you visit the Sigur Rós – Route One website you can watch the live stream of the event and view the band's real-time position on a Google Map. I actually suspect that the band members themselves are not participating in the actual drive. However the live stream of the journey does include a Sigur Rós soundtrack.

The soundtrack is being created live by generative music software using elements from the Sigur Rós' song 'óveður'.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Stonehenge in Your City has mapped the perfect streets in hundreds of cities around the world to view the winter and summer solstices. Each map shows streets in your city which are aligned
with the sunset or sunrise on the winter and summer solstices.

The streets aligned with the summer solstice sunrise are shown on the map in orange and the streets aligned with the sunset are colored red.

In the middle of the Twentieth Century new highways were driven through a large number of American cities, ruining the character of many neighborhoods for ever.

The Institute for Quality Communities at the University of Oklahoma has put together a series of historical and modern aerial images to show the impact of mid-Twentieth Century urban renewal on American cities. 60 Years of Urban Change allows you to compare historical aerial images of a number of America's biggest cities with aerial imagery of the same areas, showing how they look today.

By comparing the modern and historical aerial imagery it is possible to see the impact of the mid-century construction boom on many of these cities. New highways, parking lots, housing projects and mega-structures were built at the expense of small lots of integrated streets and tight communities.

Hopefully in another 60 years the University of Oklahoma will be able to repeat the exercise to show how much cities have improved thanks to the replacement of inner-city highways with vast networks of bike paths.

The USA is experiencing a drug overdose epidemic. Drug overdose deaths have more than doubled in the last 15 years. The cause for a lot of these overdose deaths appears to be the heavy marketing of powerful prescription painkillers by the pharmaceutical industry.

The Guardian has illustrated the rising number of drug overdose deaths in the USA with an animated choropleth map, which shows the number of overdose deaths at county level from 1999-2014. The map uses data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Guardian article includes a number of smaller animated choropleth maps to illustrate the rise in overdose deaths in a number of specific states. The animations in these smaller maps is slowed down a little, which helps to visualize the spread of overdose deaths by county in each of the highlighted states.

Mapbox's Live Earthquake Tracker is a nice mapped visualization of the latest earthquake data from the USGS. The map allows you to view the locations and the size of the most recent seismic activity around the world on a global map.

Using the drop-down menu in the map sidebar you can choose to view the last 24 hours, the last week or the last month of earthquake activity. The sidebar also provide links and satellite views of the three latest earthquakes and the three strongest earthquakes within your chosen time frame.

The map itself shows the epicenter of each earthquake and its magnitude. You can also hover over each earthquake displayed on the map to view details of the selected earthquake's magnitude and depth.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Fuglefjellet island in Norway is famous among ornithologists for its many species of nesting seabirds. You can now explore the island and learn more about its native seabirds in a wonderful new 3d map of the island created by NRK.

Fuglefjellet - Spesial is an amazing 3d story map which introduces you to the different species of birds living on the island. As you scroll through the story map you can learn more about the natural features of the island and the many types of seabirds that nest on Fuglefjellet.

The 3d map of Fuglefjellet also includes links to NRK's live webcams on the island, which allow you to watch the various species of seabirds in
real-time. There are seven webcams to watch or you can view the 'All Birds' screen, which rotates through live views from all seven webcams.

Hundred Acre Wood, the home of Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin, Tigger and Eeyore is now on Google Maps. The map of Hundred Acre Wood even has Street View
scenes which allow you to explore inside the homes of your favorite A.A. Milne characters.

To celebrate the 90th anniversary of the first Winnie the Pooh book Disney has used the Google Maps API to create an interactive map of the world of Winnie the Pooh. You can use the Google Maps panning and zoom controls to explore the map. If you click on any of the characters' homes on the map you can also travel inside and explore them in Street View.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

English football players are a parochial bunch who don't like to travel too far from home. In fact all 23 players in the England squad for the 2016 European Championship play in the English Premier League.

The Irish on the other hand are known for their willingness to travel in search of fame and fortune. Not one player in the Republic of Ireland's Euro 2016 plays in the League of Ireland. Mind you Irish soccer players don't seem to travel too far from home, 22 of their 23 player squad play in the English football leagues.

Club vs Country is an interactive map which shows where in the world all the players in the 2016 European Championship ply their careers. Select a country's badge and you can view a map showing where all 23 players in their squad play their professional football. A little information window also opens which shows the number of players who play in their home country and the number who play abroad.

Euro 2016: The Multicultural Championship is an interactive map which shows the ancestry of players in this year's UEFA European Championship. 24 European nations are competing in the competition. However many other countries around the world will be represented by players who have migrated from or who have ancestry in those countries.

You can select any of the 24 national teams playing in the competition to view a Leaflet.js powered map showing the birthplaces or ancestry of
the team's players. Players who were born in other countries are shown in red, players whose parents migrated from other countries are shown in
white and players with ancestry in other countries are shown in yellow.

According to the Multicultural Championship league table France is the most diverse team, with 65% of the players having been born or having
ancestry in other countries. The least diverse country is Romania, with 0 players having ancestry outside of Romania.

Friday, June 17, 2016

Earlier this week Explore the Earth with Tim Peake was released. This interactive map features a series of beautiful images of our planet taken by British Astronaut Tim Peake from the International Space Station.

NASA also has its own interactive map featuring photographs of Earth. The Image Composites map allows you to view composite images of our planet which were taken from the perspective of the ISS's low Earth orbit. These composite images consist of a series of overlapping photographs of Earth which have been merged together to create one panoramic image.

The Image Composite map allows you to search and view these photographs by the location which is depicted in the picture.

Discovering Britain is a wonderful resource for finding guided walks in the UK. Created by the Royal Geographical Society, Discovering Britain can help you find interesting walks by location, by length of walk or by type of landscape (urban, rural and coastal).

Each of the walks in Discovering Britain includes an interactive mapped route. These routes are displayed on an Ordnance Survey map and include map markers which provide information about points of interest that you will encounter on the walk.

Most of the walks also include a 'written guide', which you can print out to take on your walk. These written guides provide a map, detailed directions and great information about what you will see and discover on your walk.

A few of of the walks in Discovering Britain also have audio guides available for download. These audio guides provide a narrated description of your walk and the points of interest that you will encounter.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Hundred Acre Wood, the home of Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin, Tigger and Eeyore is now on Google Maps. The map of Hundred Acre Wood even has Street View scenes which allow you to explore inside the homes of your favorite A.A. Milne characters.

To celebrate the 90th anniversary of the first Winnie the Pooh book Disney has used the Google Maps API to create an interactive map of the world of Winnie the Pooh. You can use the usual Google Maps panning and zoom controls to explore the map. If you click on any of the characters' homes on the map you can also travel inside and explore them in Street View.

These Street View scenes of the characters' homes include interactive elements which allow you to click on objects, access little games and watch videos.

Disney say that they will be adding new elements to the interactive map of Hundred Acre Wood over time.

The map shows areas of the population which live in areas with a potential health threat from oil and gas pollution. If you select a state on the map you can view details on the number of people and schools which are within the 'Threat Radius' from active oil and gas wells, compressors and processors.

The map includes over 100 infrared videos that make visible volatile organic compounds emitted by oil and gas wells, which are invisible to the naked eye. You can also watch over 50 video interviews with citizens impacted by oil and gas methane pollution across the United States.

The Dark Map of European Infrastructure is an interesting map of the European public transit system. At the lowest zoom levels the map only shows the continent's railway lines and its train & bus stations.

The yellow lines on the map are the railway lines. The yellow dots are train stations and the white dots are bus stations. It is fascinating how a recognizable map of Europe emerges just from the infrastructure of its public transport systems.

The map also seems to reveal some interesting patterns in European transit systems. For example Spain stands out as it seems to have far more bus stations (white) than railway lines and stations (yellow). However it might be a mistake to make any assumptions based on the map as it does seem to have a few errors in the data. The huge yellow patch over Switzerland appears to be partly down to the fact that bus stations in Switzerland have been colored yellow instead of white.

This indoor mapping plug-in for the Leaflet mapping platform looks very interesting. The plug-in provides an easy way to create indoor maps with different floor levels.

I haven't had time to play with the Leaflet Indoor plug-in myself but it looks to be fairly straightforward. If you want to see the plug-in in action then you can view an example map that uses Leaflet Indoor in this demo.

As I understand it Leaflet Indoor allows you to create your Indoor Map using any method that you want, for example mapping out rooms and corridors with polylines and polygons. The Leaflet Indoor documentation suggests that the data for your floor plans should be created in a GeoJSON feature collection.

Once you have a floor plan you then assign it a level property. This level property is then used by the Leaflet Indoor control component to show the correct floor plan when a map user selects a floor level.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Esri has created an interactive map showcasing a collection of stunning photos of Earth taken by astronaut Tim Peake, from aboard the International Space Station. Explore the Earth with Tim Peake features a series of beautiful images of our planet taken from the perspective of the ISS's low Earth orbit.

With such unrivaled views it isn't surprising that astronauts on board the ISS love taking photographs of the Earth. In fact this isn't the first interactive map to feature pictures taken by ISS astronauts. You can view photos taken by astronauts Chris Hadfield and Thomas H. Marshburn on the Our World from the ISS map.

Dave MacLean has also made an interactive map showcasing some of the photos from ISS Missions 40 and 41. Don's map also shows the live position of the International Space Station in real-time.

Fuglefjellet island in Norway is famous among ornithologists for its many species of nesting seabirds. You can now explore the island and learn more about its native seabirds in a wonderful new 3d map of the island created by NRK.

Fuglefjellet - Spesial is an amazing 3d story map which introduces you to the different species of birds living on the island. As you scroll through the story map you can learn more about the natural features of the island and the many types of seabirds that nest on Fuglefjellet.

The 3d map of Fuglefjellet also includes links to NRK's live webcams on the island, which allow you to watch the various species of seabirds in real-time. Because of Norway's long hours of sun-light in the summer months this is a great time to visit these live webcams. There are seven webcams to watch or you can view the 'All Birds' screen, which rotates through live views from all seven webcams.